Nielsen has released their annual State of Media report. It covers how people are utilizing devices, connecting with, and consuming media. This report is cleverly designed and worth your time to review. These indicators will come in handy in the year to come.

Client calls demanding an answer: “Why am I not #1 in the Google for the most ambiguous term in the history of language?”

As practitioners, our natural instinct is to start explaining the technical aspects of what’s going on. Links this, competitive density that, crumb code and content the other… during this, to most clients, we quickly start sounding like the adult characters from Peanuts; “Wawa, wa wawawawa”. While these are valid responses to the client’s inquiry, they tend to leave clients miffed and doubtful. So how do we solve this problem?

SEV for all Mankind

One of the things we’ve learned at WordsGoHere over the years is how little actual value absolute rank brings to the table. Compounded by the ever increasing impact that results personalization and location-specification the search engines are employing (signed in or not), we’ve been forced to evolve our thinking. We’ve transitioned our view of SERP performance from a ranking report to a concept we refer to as a Search Engine Visibility Score, (SEV score). To introduce valuable depth to the KPI, we have added a secondary KPI, the percentage of visible queries that are producing visits to the site. It doesn’t have a fancy acronym yet.

Before we go any further, allow us to be painfully clear; this is a KPI that has been “fabricated” as required by our experiences. The SEV score is born out of a need to simplify the presentation and explanation of SERP data to clients that did not (nor should they really be required to) understand organic visibility past the concept of a Ricky Bobby-esque “If you’re not first, you’re last” perspective. We can tell you that since we first introduced it to our clients, the feedback has been genuinely appreciative. They declare that they get it, and appreciate the real transparency this approach provides. In fairness, since beginning our efforts to write this article, we found that the fine folks at SEO Gadget suggesting Search Engine Visibility as a Metric. Might be something to this?

SEV Details & Definition

SEV is a simple concept really. Its a percentage of the total number of target queries that are visible within an acceptable threshold of positions in the SERPs. If your SERP tracking tool is suggesting anywhere in say the range of the first page, or even top 20, odds are favorable that your site is being served in the SERPs and offered SEV opportunities. Take this a step further by looking at the number of those queries that are producing visitor – the real purpose of Search Engine Visibility after all – you suddenly have a contextually rich and meaningful KPI to discuss with your clients about your efforts. Visibility, while impressive in its own right, means little unless it’s driving opportunity (visits).

The conversation will quickly move away from being #1. You will have helped the client realize that it is actually about how many opportunities your efforts are providing their business. Nothing beats showing how you are paying for yourself!

By nature, we all like bigger numbers (especially clients), and we understand that anything shy of 100% could be better. We are also trained to appreciate a climbing trend line. We all understand that concept as “progress”. Using KPIs that will allow you to frame your efforts in a trend-able fashion, will resonate with any business stakeholder or client.

Lets take a gander at the technical how to.

How to Calculate SEV Scores

The scene :: you are targeting visibility and monitoring 100 queries across the major 3 engines.

No one actually reads those terms of service agreements when downloading new software, or signing up for a service, right? Or am I the only one that clicks the checkbox without reading it? Those things could make us promise our first-born, and we would have to oblige should we get an email from legaldept@rumpelstiltskin.com.

We take it on faith that the companies we trust with our data would never put anything so sinister in their Terms of Service, but what if?

I bring this up because dealing with so much data as i do, I also deal with a lot of privacy policies. Since September every time I go through a privacy policy I’m reminded of a post from Brad Geddes at Search Engine saying that 90% of websites using a Google product are breaking at least one of their terms of service. Think about that for a second; if a small business is running an AdWords campaign, using Google Analytics, Google Places, Webmaster Tools, or any other Google Apps, etc, there is a 90% chance that the business could realistically be held responsible in a lawsuit.

Think about this scenario:

Someone, a non-Gmail user, sues Google. Why? Because Google gets sued every day, duh. The complaint of the user is that they visited a website and they didn’t know Google Analytics was tracking them.

Google’s crack legal team looks at the offending website and finds that there is no privacy policy anywhere on the website.

Google says that the website doesn’t have a privacy policy, which is a violation of the Terms and Conditions. They are the ones that should be sued.

This idea isn’t far off. Google is in enough hotwateroverseas from privacy hawks and anti-trust concerns. They’ve got enough headaches to worry about to come after a small business or two themselves. But in covering their own (Edit: you-know-whats), I speculate that it would be pretty easy to point the finger somewhere else just to get something off their backs.

A quick update to your privacy policy can ensure you avoid sitting in the cross-hairs.